The Survival of the Smallest: Stability Conditions for the Cultural Evolution of Compositional Language

Recent work in the field of computational evolutionary linguistics suggests that the dynamics arising from the cultural evolution of language can explain the emergence of syntactic structure. We build on this work by introducing a model of language acquisition based on the Minimum Description Length Principle. Our experiments show that compositional syntax is most likely to occur under two conditions specific to hominids: (i) A complex meaning space structure, and (ii) the poverty of the stimulus.

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